The 2011-2014 Bahrain protests pitted the mostly Shi‘i opposition against the Sunni Al Khalifa ruling family. These protests, initially aimed at achieving equality and greater political freedom for the majority Shi‘i population, turned into a call for revolution, and then an arena of regional rivalry, followed by external intervention. This series of events evoked “memories” of an earlier crisis—the crisis that began with an uprising in 1922, widened in 1923 to include Iranian nationals, gained the attention of the Pahlavi government in Tehran, and culminated in the dramatic British interventions that laid the foundations of the modern state administration in Bahrain. Various actors and eye-witnesses including British colonial officers, Iranian nationals residing in Bahrain, Shi‘i villagers and Sunni tribesmen, produced divergent narratives and interpretations of these events. During the 2011-2014 Bahrain protests and their aftermath, these historical narratives were revived, revised and deployed for political purposes. Oppositionists invoked the 1922 “Shi‘i uprising,” and disseminated British archival documents attesting to past traumas suffered by the Shi‘a at the hands of the Al Khalifa. In this context, history and memory were deployed as instruments of identity construction and group mobilization. Fresh state-sanctioned counter-narratives were also produced. They depicted the “civil strife" (fitna) of 1922-23 as the consequences of a British colonial policy which manipulated ethnic and religious differences in service to “divide and rule” tactics. Sectarianism in Bahrain is not an organic schism, they argue, but rather a colonial myth whose persistent shadow exposes Bahrain to internal fragmentation and external interference. Fresh analyses of the same historical events were also produced in Iran. These analyses revived the tale of the “people’s uprising” against the illegitimate colonial rule of the British on the “Iranian Island of Bahrain.” The 2011-2014 protests were thus cast as a continuation of the Bahraini people’s quest for “solidarity with their motherland.” This study employs narrative analysis to explore how and why the events of 1922-23 were remembered and communicated by states and social groups during the 2011-2014 Bahrain protests and their aftermath. The study examines fresh scholarly analyses of these historical events in Arabic, Persian and English, as well as the cultural production and dissemination of related historical narratives and collective memories by means of online media. These contested narratives of Bahrain’s past will be located within the politically charged context of the 2011-2014 protests to shed light on the relationship between memory and politics in Bahrain.